Stakeholder engagement in food risk management: Evaluation of an iterated workshop approach

There are considerable uncertainties regarding how stakeholder engagement should be enacted. The lack of clear guidelines on good practice is arguably a consequence of an absence of evaluations on the effectiveness of past engagement exercises. Here we describe the evaluation of one engagement event concerning food risk management. This event involved presenting a novel food risk analysis model to key stakeholders in two workshops (in 2005 and 2007) in order to gather opinions and to consider the model's likely impact on the wider community. The workshops and their evaluation, using elements of a previously developed evaluation framework, are described. The discussion emphasises how the organisers utilised the first evaluation report in order to improve the subsequent workshop. In the concluding section, the merits of both the engagement process and the methods used to evaluate it are discussed. Broader lessons for the academic, practitioner and policy communities are developed.